The staggering hubris of the end game

Memphis beat UNLV 27-21 last Saturday night in Las Vegas, a good game between two programs most models projected as Group of 6 playoff contenders. Charles Huff was making his Memphis coaching debut after Ryan Silverfield was poached by Arkansas. Memphis trailed in the third quarter, scored the final 13 points and won on national television.

Memphis fans barely got to enjoy it before the conversation turned to which Power 4 program eventually would take their new coach.

Silverfield was the third straight Memphis coach taken by a P4 program. Justin Fuente left for Virginia Tech and Mike Norvell for Florida State. Now Huff wins his first game and, practically before the sweat dries, here comes the speculation about where he might go next.

That’s the welcome mat for successful Group of 6 programs these days: Prove you’re good enough and somebody richer gets to take what you built.

That dynamic now extends well beyond coaches and players. The most powerful people in college football are moving toward a system that extracts whatever value the G6 produces while steadily narrowing its access to the part of the sport that matters most. They justify it with arguments about competitive strength, television value and economic reality that fall apart pretty quickly when you examine them. The greater miscalculation may be assuming that 60-plus universities and millions of angry fans will simply accept the arrangement once the door finally closes.

The push-pull between the financial classes in this sport has been going on for more than 40 years. The Bowl Coalition gave way to the BCS, then the playoff era, while conference realignment and autonomy steadily concentrated more money and control among fewer institutions.

We’ve been through plenty of versions of this fight. This one feels different because of the confidence with which the people at the top are talking.

The separate G6 playoff conversation resurfaced before Week 1 was even finished. The SEC’s scheduling proposal has hardened around nine conference games plus one mandatory Power 4 nonconference opponent, effectively requiring 10 P4 games every year. Greg Sankey has said he’d support expanding the College Football Playoff to 24 teams if a 10-P4-opponent standard becomes universal. The Big 12 and ACC already require 10 Power 4 opponents in 2026.

Think about the trap that creates. Play 10 Power 4 opponents or risk being deemed unworthy of playoff consideration while the conferences capable of providing those games increasingly remove G6 opponents from their schedules.

It’s a heck of a system. You create the standard, control access to the games required to meet it and then judge everybody else for failing the test.

ESPN’s College GameDay opened Saturday morning with a segment treating conference realignment as a punch line. There was a Where’s Waldo bit about Northern Illinois joining the Mountain West and Texas State joining the Pac-12. Laughs all around.

Funny stuff from the network whose media deals did more than almost anything else to create the financial imbalance and nonsensical conference geography that made these moves necessary. ESPN helped build the system, then uses its biggest platform to mock the schools scrambling to survive inside it. College GameDay increasingly looks like SEC GameDay, while G6 games during the week routinely become lead-ins for promotion of upcoming Power 4 games instead of getting sustained attention themselves.

The fans notice. Of course they notice.

Meanwhile, another old argument has returned with renewed confidence: The talent gap has grown so large that the Group of 6 simply can’t compete anymore. I’ve heard versions of the claim that even the best G6 program couldn’t beat the worst P4 team.

About that ...

UMass went to Piscataway on Thursday night and beat Rutgers 37-21.

This was UMass, 0-12 last season and riding a 16-game losing streak dating to October 2024. The Minutemen entered the game as 28.5-point underdogs. By any reasonable measure, this was a program trying to climb out from the very bottom of major college football.

Rutgers sits comfortably inside the Big Ten and cashes a media-rights check north of $60 million a year.

UMass beat them by 16 points in their own stadium.

Dylan Lonergan threw three interceptions and lost a fumble. Pop Watson III passed for 197 yards and three touchdowns. UMass scored 37 points, its largest FBS victory margin since 2018. It was the first Power conference victory in the program’s FBS history.

The team that went 0-12 in the G6 last season spent much of Thursday night delivering a WWE-level smackdown to a Big Ten program on national television.

Tell me again the G6 can’t compete.

We’ve already published the television numbers from the Senate Commerce Committee’s analysis, and Rutgers is a useful example. It appeared in only two of the 100 most-watched games across the two seasons studied. Wake Forest, Pitt and Syracuse didn’t appear at all.

I’ve looked at the television history much farther back than those two seasons. Go back to 1984, when the Supreme Court broke the NCAA’s control over college football television and unleashed the modern marketplace, and the pattern is remarkably consistent. Almost every one of the biggest games involves at least one member of a relatively small collection of national brands.

You know who they are. Alabama, Ohio State, Michigan, Notre Dame, Texas, Georgia, USC, Oklahoma, Penn State and the other programs that have moved in and out of that top tier over the years. Draw the line at 20 or stretch it to 25. For more than 40 years, those schools have driven a wildly disproportionate share of the national television value of college football.

One game repeatedly crashes the party without one of those brands: Army-Navy.

Two programs outside the Power 4 routinely produce one of the biggest audiences of the season because Army-Navy has enormous value of its own. The rivalry, the schools, the history and what the game represents draw the audience. Nobody checks the conference patches before deciding whether to watch.

The marketplace has been telling us the same thing since 1984. A relatively small group of individual brands drives the overwhelming majority of national television demand. Conference realignment has spent 40 years rearranging which other schools get to share the money those brands generate.

Rutgers is one of the great beneficiaries. It belongs to a conference with Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State and other brands commanding enormous national audiences. Rutgers got itself into one heck of a club, and that club distributes its enormous collective television revenue among the members.

Good for Rutgers. Seriously. That’s a fantastic deal.

Just spare me the lecture about economic or competitive merit.

Rutgers didn’t create $60 million-plus worth of annual television demand for Rutgers football. Conference membership allows it to share in value generated disproportionately by somebody else. That’s how conferences work, and Rutgers would be stupid to apologize for cashing the check.

The nonsense begins when receiving that check becomes evidence of competitive superiority. A large portion of the Power 4 uses wealth generated collectively — and disproportionately by its biggest brands — as proof that everyone outside the club belongs beneath them.

That’s why the UMass game matters beyond the comedy of a 28.5-point underdog administering a beatdown. Rutgers possesses every credential this emerging system wants to use as shorthand for competitive legitimacy: conference affiliation, enormous media distributions, a P4 schedule and all the financial advantages that come with them.

UMass had none of those advantages and beat Rutgers by 16 points in its own building.

Conference affiliation tells you where the television money goes. It has never told you who deserves to play football against whom.

Rutgers is a knockoff product wearing a name-brand label. Plenty of others are, too.

There will be blowouts this weekend. G6 teams will lose to P4 opponents by four or five touchdowns, and the usual voices will point at the scoreboard as proof that the gap has become insurmountable.

Watch how selectively that standard gets applied.

When a Group of 6 team gets run out of the stadium, the loss becomes an indictment of the entire tier. When Oregon gets blown out in the CFP, Oregon lost. Nobody demands that Vanderbilt, Rutgers and Wake Forest surrender their seats at the table because another member of their economic class got its butt kicked.

NFL teams get blown out in the Super Bowl. Bad losses happen at every level. Only the G6 is routinely asked to answer for all 60-plus programs every time one of them loses badly.

And anyone talking about a widening competitive gap ought to acknowledge how much effort has gone into widening it.

Win 10 games and somebody raids your coaching staff. Develop an NFL player and richer programs start working the portal. The Power 4 would poach players at halftime if they could figure out the paperwork.

Then they point at the results and call it proof of competitive inferiority.

You can’t strip-mine a program’s talent every year and cite the depleted roster as evidence that the program was never any good in the first place.

That’s a protection racket.

North Texas won 10 games last season. Oklahoma State took its head coach, 18 staff members and 19 players. The Mean Green return zero starters. There are 72 new players on the 2026 roster.

North Texas opened the 2026 season Saturday at defending national champion Indiana and lost 52-16.

Somebody will cite that score as evidence the G6 can’t compete. They will neglect to mention who made North Texas look like that.

What makes the anger different now is the money. G6 fans are being asked to fund the players. Revenue sharing, NIL collectives, booster campaigns — everywhere they turn, somebody wants them to give more. North Texas fans helped pay for the development of those players, and when Oklahoma State came calling, the school got nothing for them. The investment walked out the door and suited up for a program that already had tens of millions more in annual revenue.

The argument for separating the G6 has circulated in one form or another for decades. What has my attention now is the sense that some of the people making it believe the moment has finally arrived when they can pull it off.

Every previous cycle of this fight eventually found guardrails. The Bowl Coalition fights gave way to the BCS. The BCS produced lawsuits and political pressure. Playoff expansion brought another round of threats and negotiation. People pushed, antitrust lawyers rattled sabers, somebody moved the line and enough access survived to keep everybody invested in the same system.

That’s what feels different now. The people with the power increasingly sound like they don’t care whether the other 60-plus programs remain invested at all.

And the fans hear them.

I know these fan bases. I’ve covered them for decades. Through Diehard, I talk to them every day.

They are ticked off, and the anger runs deeper than anything I’ve seen in the previous cycles of this fight.

The disrespect has moved into the open. It’s on television, on GameDay and during broadcasts of the very games these schools are playing. Fans hear their programs discussed primarily as places where coaches and players wait until a richer school wants them. They see access shrinking while the people shrinking it mock their programs and then explain that their inability to overcome the resulting disadvantages proves they never belonged.

Every time they clear the bar, somebody moves it. Eventually people figure out the bar was never the point.

There will be lawsuits. Antitrust lawyers will do what antitrust lawyers do. Congress may decide it wants another piece of this.

I’m more interested in what happens when millions of people who have supported college football their entire lives decide the sport has declared them expendable.

I’ve seen one version of it already.

In December 2014, UAB’s football program was shut down. The UA System Board of Trustees kept its distance from the decision, even if everyone in Alabama knew where it came from. The people responsible badly miscalculated what UAB’s supporters would do next.

Fans organized and raised money. They packed Birmingham City Hall and worked political channels across the state. Business leaders became involved. Pressure reached the governor’s office. People who had never imagined becoming activists over college football suddenly had a cause.

They took on some of the most powerful institutional machinery in Alabama and won. UAB announced the reinstatement of football in June 2015 and returned to the field in 2017.

I’ve thought about that experience a lot lately. UAB supporters weren’t some uniquely militant species of college football fan. They believed something deeply connected to their university, community and identity was being unjustly taken from them. Once that happened, the people who supposedly held all the power discovered how difficult those fans were to control.

Now multiply it.

There are more than 60 fan bases sitting on this side of college football’s widening economic divide. Millions of people belong to them, many of whom have spent their lives identifying with the underdog and believing the system is stacked against their schools.

Now you’re thinking about giving all of them a common enemy.

There is an old lesson in that kind of arrogance. Tell the peons to eat cake long enough and eventually they won’t just stop working your fields.

They’ll burn the damn things.

Freeze these programs completely out and you are dreaming if you think all those fans will shrug, turn on Alabama-Georgia and happily become consumers of the new Power 4 product. Some will stop watching. Others will boycott sponsors, move their money elsewhere or carry the grudge for the rest of their lives and make damned sure their children and grandchildren understand why.

Some will look for ways to fight back.

The Group of 6 has millionaires and billionaires too. Its alumni include powerful people in business, law, politics and media. Some have money, connections, plenty of time and the capacity to become an enormous problem for somebody.

Angry wealthy alumni with resources and a grudge can fund 100,000 FOIAs across every P4 university if that’s what they decide to do. Athletic departments, compliance offices, presidential expense accounts, board correspondence — every place where decisions get made and people have operated for years with a reasonable expectation that nobody with unlimited time, money and motivation was going to inspect every drawer.

OK, 100,000 might be a little much.

I’m only half kidding.

Every institution has skeletons. Every large organization has decisions somebody would rather not explain on the front page. Create enough motivated people with resources and fury, and eventually somebody starts digging.

Push them hard enough and I promise you somebody will look.

College football has maintained this increasingly unequal ecosystem for decades because almost everybody still believed they had some stake in it. G6 fans knew Alabama had more money than UAB and Ohio State had more resources than Toledo. They understood that reality.

They weren’t asking for equal television checks or identical budgets.

They wanted access.

Give us a path. Let us play our way in. Give us some reasonable standard that means something if we meet it on the field.

And every time they won a little more access, the powers-that-be rewrote the rules.

Now, after 40 years of moving the bar, you’re contemplating removing the path altogether.

I talk to these fans every day. I hear the seething anger that’s already there, and I remember what happened in Birmingham when people with enormous institutional power badly underestimated one fan base they assumed couldn’t do anything about it.

Multiply that anger across the Group of 6 and I have no idea exactly where it leads.

I wouldn’t want to be the arrogant fool who decides to find out.

More from this series

The war never stopped

The Moat: The real divide in college sports isn’t driven by what you think

Savior or surrender: The G6 playoff proposal isn’t what it looks like

The door that only opens from the inside

The Diehard League

Tim Stephens is the founder and CEO of Diehard Sports Network and the former sports editor of the Birmingham Post-Herald. He has covered the business and politics of college athletics for more than 25 years.